With the help of the New York Mets organization and several Mets players, Plimpton wrote a convincing account of a new unknown pitcher in the Mets spring training camp named Siddhartha Finch, who threw a baseball over 160mph, wore a heavy boot on one foot, and was a practicing Buddhist with a largely unknown background. 1 draft choice of the Lions in 1965. Wed gone to dinner and the maitre d comes over and says, Felix, I got a call for you from Monaco., I pick up the phone, and I hear Georges Bostonian accent. He was an actor and writer, known for Good Will Hunting (1997), Nixon (1995) and Just Cause (1995). And what have we here? My moms initial impression was that he was a little hoity-toityI mean, who did this guy think he was?, But the second time they met, it was, in fact, my fathers voice that won her over. My dad and I could not lose each other, but we could never quite find each other, either. Its our anniversary. Whee!! I knew that between the time Id asked Plimpton to do the auction and the night itself, he had probably received five invitations for a better evening, but he would never have reneged. Revolutionary musket, a stairwell and a housemaster), Return of the Big Bopper. Aldas version was always angry or consternated, like a character in a Woody Allen film, while my dad, though he certainly faced hurdles as an amateur in the world of the professional, bore his humiliations with a comic lightness and charmmuch of which emanated from that befuddled, self-deprecating professors voice. He was also an accomplished birdwatcher. That is, until I saw the documentarythe assassination of his dear friend Bobby Kennedy. A lordly accent acquired at St. Bernard's and burnished later at Cambridge, in England, enhanced his distinguished aura, as did elevated stature and a silver head of hair which might have encouraged a career in politics but mercifully did not. George Plimpton Dec 1, 2014 In which the venturous author, the rawest rookie pro football has ever known, recounts all the excruciating details of what happened when he called five plays as. Firstly, then-managing director of SI, Mark Mulvoy, gave Plimpton the liberty to create a hoax.Secondly, SI photographer Lane Stewart recruited his friend, Joe Berton to play the part of Sidd Finch. Norman Mailer said that George Plimpton was the best-loved man in New York. Friends were almost always happy to see him because you knew he was bound to improve your mood. [Then] this August he showed up, pulled the shirt over his head, and said he was ready to bat. ), this isnt some kind of morbid contest to see who can be the first to inform the board of some celebritys death. Yes he is gone. Plimpton himself described it as a "New England cosmopolitan accent"[36] or "Eastern seaboard cosmopolitan" accent. He was smooth. This book is the party that was George's life-and it's a big one-attended by scores of famous people, as well as. Typical of George to laugh about something others saw as a defining traithe never took himself all that seriously. After the technology improved the need to speak so histrionically went away, and so did "announcer English.". Hed go on to move freely through so many worlds and circles, without ever not speaking in that singular accentthough it probably would have made life easier for him if hed adopted a new way of talking (after all, as a journalist in the locker rooms, where slang and cursing were art-forms, my dads stiff, formal tongue made him stick out like an egret among ducks). Thats a common name for such an accent. *Originally posted by CBCD * Felix Grucci Jr., of Fireworks by Grucci (Plimpton wrote about the Grucci family, widely held to be the first family of fireworks, in Fireworks: A History and Celebration):George had a very big passion for fireworks. I dont give a rats ass about informing anyone about the death of Plimpton. It was always as if one were setting out with him on a special adventure. Plimpton was .the public face of the New York intellectual: tweedy, eclectic and with a plummy accent he himself described as "Eastern seaboard cosmopolitan." . Daniel Kunitz, managing editor of the Paris Review from1995-2000: I once heard George joking with William F. Buckley on the phone about how they had the last affected accents in New York. The s. He is widely known for his sports writing and for helping to found The Paris Review, as well as his patrician demeanor and accent. He was 76.. These experiences served as the basis of another football book, Mad Ducks and Bears, although much of the book dealt with the off-field escapades and observations of football friends Alex Karras ("Mad Duck") and John Gordy ("Bear"). 2) The Role of Broadway and Hollywood, and the Shift from Jimmy Cagney to Marlon Brando. Quite sad, as he just had a daughter not many years back. Eerily enough, one of the messages on my answering machine was from George, with that distinctive accent of his: Hallo, its George Plimpton. If you didnt know the man, you could, I think, be fooled by the voice. He smiled broadly, signaled for the coach to send Lupica in to run for him, and trotted back to the sidelines. Listen to Caruso singing or Bix Beiderbecke playing his cornet to hear how muffled was the recording of those sounds. His father co-founded the law firm Debevoise Plimpton. He came from a family where such endearments were not expressed, and phone conversations were curt. Again with thanks to Jonathan Fields, here's the continuation of George Plimpton's famous interview of Ernest Hemingway from the Paris Review, Summer 1958. A similar phenomenon can be noted in the use, well into the 1980s, of the recorded sound of teletype machines in the background of newscasts, a sound still faintly evoked by the bip-bip-bip patterns of music that often introduces news broadcasts, even though teletype machines are long gone The subconscious association of this pattern of sound with news is fading fast with the passing of the years and will undoubtedly disappear entirely in the coming decade as surely as the over-enunciated style of radio speech of the 30s disappeared within a generation of its no longer being needed. It was a hot, sweltering day. After her transformation, I noted that Mia sounds precisely like her mother, Maureen OSullivan, who had that patrician manner of speaking on and off screen. A lifelong New Yorker, he never tasted a bagel or an olive, and he never chewed a stick of gum. My fathers voice was like one of those supposedly extinct deep-sea creatures that wash up on the shores of Argentina every now and then. With a little more practice, you could give us boys in the big leagues a run for our money. He is connected by blood to Benjamin "Beast" Butler, a rakish pol who told Abraham Lincoln he would be his running mate "only if you die within three. A reader writes: Ive wondered about this myself when I see old Jimmy Cagney moviesand the date of his last starring role might give us a hint towards the date range of the change: "One, Two, Three" in 1961. Among other challenges for Sports Illustrated, he attempted to play top-level bridge, and spent some time as a high-wire circus performer. [citation needed] Some of these events, such as his stint with the Colts, and an attempt at stand-up comedy, were presented on the ABC television network as a series of specials. Plimpton also appeared in a number of feature films as an extra and in cameo appearances. He just did it because Columbia was another literary magazine. He is widely known for his sports writing and for helping to found The Paris Review. He plays the 'fancy pants' to our outhouse Americana," Flaherty asserted. [47][48] **. Mr . Old money, would never say the word spanky, and certainly had more money than God could count. "He speaks with an oddly mannered accent, sounding as though on the verge of a stammer, polite, genteel, perhaps just a little Woosterish. Youll get another shot at the big time, trust me. The flipped prestige markers point here is fascinating. Almost twenty years ago, writing quirky sports pieces for the Village Voice, I decided to enter the world of championship arm wrestling.Like many young writers, I was inspired by the sports adventures of the gaunt but game George Plimpton, who had made a literary career out of placing himself in . In the "I'm Spelling as Fast as I Can" episode of The Simpsons, he hosts the "Spellympics" and attempts to bribe Lisa Simpson to lose with the offer of a scholarship at a Seven Sisters College and a hot plate; "it's perfect for soup! Larchmont Lockjaw? He was not himself interested in poetry, but he read all of the poems every quarter, and he would tell me what he thought of them. Vault. Plimpton appeared in the 1989 documentary The Tightrope Dancer which featured the life and the work of the artist Vali Myers. Besides, third is a very respectable showing! Sign up for the Books & Fiction newsletter. It was as if some old gentlemans code prohibited us from interacting as human beings. George Plimpton, journalist extraordinaire, trains with and then performs as Quarterback for the Baltimore Colts. Well, perhaps it's more accurate to say that the book provided entertaining confirmation to millions of people that they -- like the author . Discussing the accent he used for Washington in an interview with The Onion AV Club, he explained: The accent back then was probably nothing like what we think of as a Southern accent now or a New England accent now, so we tried to find the root of the accents. At Harvard, Plimpton was a classmate and close personal friend of Robert F. Kennedy. Jay McInerney, author:Arriving in Manhattan as a young writer, nothing was more thrilling or daunting than attending my first Paris Review party at Georges townhouse on East 72nd in the fall of 1984. [29], His enthusiasm for fireworks grew, and he was appointed Fireworks Commissioner of New York by Mayor John Lindsay,[29][30] an unofficial post he held until his death. He wrote for the Harvard Lampoon, was a member of the Hasty Pudding Club, Pi Eta, the Signet Society, and the Porcellian Club. In the April 1, 1985 issue of Sports Illustrated, Plimpton pulled off a widely reported April Fools' Day prank. When George Plimpton Met the Best Bartender in Brooklyn Two New York Legends Collide By Tim Sultan February 26, 2016 The only other person that I had known who possessed a similar charisma to Sunny Balzano's was my first employer in New York: George Plimpton. Sometimes, we used to have quarrels, because he thought I took too many poems: Are you turning this magazine into a poetry magazine? he would say. Mr. Plimpton was born in Manhattan in 1927 and raised in Huntington, L.I. One reader writes: I've wondered whether that "announcer English" was at least partly caused by poor loudspeakers and microphones. silk-stockinged New Englander - private schools (he was (Newsreels ran in movie theaters, of course: what better critique of the high newsreel style than the new movies that jarred against it?). [13], Plimpton's son described him as a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant and wrote that both of Plimpton's parents were descended from Mayflower passengers.[14]. Did he have the celebrated Boston Brahmin accent, or was it a psuedo-Brit affectation? When I spoke to him my voice went up an octave and took on his formal tone and became careful and unnatural; his voice became like his fathersstern, authoritative, disciplinarianwhen his father was the last person in the universe he wanted to be. If you say, I parked my car in Harvard Yard, you are being rhotic. On one website, I read about a Choate alumn saying one can still hear the LL (see above thread) accent on campus. In the early 60s, when I was working at the firework plant with my dad [Felix Grucci], George would pull up in shiny red sports car on his way to the Hamptons. How widespread, numerically and geographically? So, pairing the Cagney hint with the Kennedy Inaugural, could we date the changeover to 1961? Angelo Dundee, trainer for Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard:George was such a great guy. We made $15,000-20,000. [41] She is the daughter of James Chittenden Dudley,[42] a managing partner of Manhattan-based investment firm Dudley and Company, and geologist Elisabeth Claypool. [21] The prank was so successful that many readers believed the story, and the ensuing popularity of the joke resulted in Plimpton's writing an entire book on Finch. With a little more practice, you could give us boys in the big leagues a run for our money. Plimpton was a writer-raconteur and dilettante in the best sense of the word: He co-founded an important literary magazine, the Paris Review, and tried his hand at everything from quarterbacking for the Detroit Lions (which he wrote about in Paper Lion), boxing with light-heavyweight champ Archie Moore (which became Shadow Box), and becoming New Yorks unofficial official fireworks commissioner. His exploits were such that at one point, The New Yorker ran a cartoon in which a patient eyed a surgeon with misgiving and said, But how do I know youre not George Plimpton?, But perhaps foremost among his accomplishments was his elevation of the interview to a literary form, both in the Paris Review and in his two superb works of oral history, Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career, and Edie, a biography of Edie Sedgwick, which he and Jean Stein compiled. He was a great addition to the human race. These events were recalled in his best-known book Paper Lion, which was later adapted into the 1968 feature film starring Alan Alda. Another entertainment-related explanation for the shift, right about the time of the Eisenhower-Kennedy transition: The plumby announcer voice that hovers over the Atlantic midway between the Eastern Seaboard and England was mortally wounded in 1959. Actors Nathan Lane (from Jersey City, NJ) and Robin Williams (grew up in SF Bay area) often adopt this accent. I can understand your frustration, but celebrities die every day. Plimpton was an omnipresence for much of American cultural lifeboth high and lowin the last third of the 20th century. Suddenly, a New York cop remembered a long-ago murder. A friend of the New England Sedgwick family, Plimpton edited Edie: An American Biography with Jean Stein in 1982. To me, Mid-Atlantic English is the nom juste for a related but distinct phenomenon (which is also mentioned in Wikipedia). Big, tall, good-looking guy, easy-going. Hows your mom? hed always ask me. A graduate of Harvard University and King's College, Cambridge, Plimpton was recruited to Paris by Peter Matthiessen in 1952 and signed on to the project shortly thereafter. In most situations, he had the remarkable quality of making everyone he talked to feel at ease, at home, welcome, no matter who they were or what they didbut for whatever strange reason there wasnt this effortlessness with me, this warmth. (This is not to belittle Lowell Thomas, but to recognize the artifice that served him so well in his career). The first minute is a cameo by Henry Ford II, who speaks in an utterly flat Midwest rather than Mid-Atlantic accent that no one would call elegant but that would sound perfectly natural in 2015. The name George Plimpton is synonymous with a kind of all-in participatory journalism. To me, it meant admission to this little exclusive club at the Paris Review. He could have been a fight trainer, a fight manager! Its strange to think, but he would have been eighty-five this year: fourteen years older than my mom, fifty years older than me. Plimpton sparred for three rounds with boxing greats Archie Moore and Sugar Ray Robinson while on assignment for Sports Illustrated. He appeared in commercials for Oldsmobile and Intellivision, and appeared. The Sidd Finch story was accompanied by a series of photos which managed to convince even the eagle-eyed fans . I had George tell him the story of Sidd Finch. I only wish I could not tell him again, just one more time. Never heard of this decidedly imprecise term. And so it seemed only fitting to commemorate his death with the form he made his own.Meghan ORourke. He never went all the way, though his authenticity and newly-downstyle speaking could probably be marked in the crisis/triumph stages of his reporting: the death of JFK; the Vietnam report; the moon landing. May a diseased yak squat in your hot tub. I havent heard that he is dead, but if so RIP George. Few could give a toast or tell a story with equal humor. I do believe his accent was decidedly Swamp Yankee. Read more. And bolstering this last point, a reader who grew up in Depression-era Chicago writes: All I can think of is that people were imitating FDR. Louis Begley, novelist:Jim Atlas interviewed me for an Art of Fiction piece in the Paris Review, a feature of the magazine that George invented and brought to perfection. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to these men speak. In all my years, Ive never heard this accent in person. So it went in late 1960 at one of George Plimpton's legendary soirees at 541 E. 72nd St., New York. Hes just trying it out and will come back and write a book about his experiences. Just listen to very early recordings from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, back even before microphones, when singers had to yell directly into a large cone and over-enunciate so that their voices would be recorded into something intelligible on a spinning wax cylinder or disk.